It is 6 am and we have just been on a plane since 1:30 am. Though I was feeling much better earlier in the night, at 10:30 pm when we headed for KK airport, the cold has now settled in my chest and I am trying my best not to cough. As we are preparing to descend the airline hostesses announce that if anyone has any symptoms of illness, they are to report the clinic in the airport for quarantine. There is no way this is going to happen. I am going home. So naturally my cough gets worse.
Shanghai Pudong Airport runways go on for ever. Oddly the airport terminals themselves are not very large. People seem to leave the airport quickly and they do so by train.
We landed and taxied, no joke for 20 minutes. Not just hanging around waiting for a gate to stop at, we are riding along at 25 miles an hour. It seems like we landed miles from the airport. We pass one whole terminal and we keep going, we actually taxied over a highway. We pass another terminal as well as the Pudong Freight Depot. Just after the freight warehouse we finally stopped at gate 305! We were so mesmerized by the taxiing experience that we did not notice that everyone around us had put on down jackets. When the plane door opened we quickly realized that it was freezing outside and that we were not about to walk into a jetway. We walked down some stairs right on to the tarmac in the dark through the rain and wind. In front of us, in the distance are two buses with the engines running and we follow the other passengers aboard one of the buses hoping it takes us to the terminal, apparently we missed an announcement that all the Chinese speaking, being almost all the other passengers on our Shanghai Air flight heard because they all seemed to know where to go. Luckily the bus was heated. Passengers were staring at us as we were still dressed for Malaysian heat. Jasmah was a little nonplussed, though she had every right to be angry with me. I had strongly suggested when we were leaving KK that she should follow my lead and put her heavy coat in the suitcase as we would not need it until we got to Seattle, which would be the first place we would need to go outside. Oops.
The buses stopped after a while at a double door. Again we followed the other passengers. Jasmah wanted to stop in the bathroom, which was just inside the door.
Here we had a lesson in Chinese custom. To our surprise while we waited our turn for the bathroom everyone just walked right past us and piled into the stalls, mother, grandmother children, all together. At one point there were so many people in one of the three stalls that they could not close the door. There was a 3 year old in there that was turning the knob on the toilet paper dispenser, yes here there was toilet paper. He was having a grand time until all of a sudden the tp dispenser opened up and blocked the door trapping Mom inside as the large industrial size roll thudded to the floor and rolled two stalls over. The little prankster being very tiny escaped the stall through the remaining crack in the door and ran for his life. While shouting, what I assume was the child's name was frantically trying to close the dispenser and free herself from the stall. Just as the Mom escaped the stall, the little boy was returned to the bathroom in the arms of a schiveled looking 4 foot nothing old women who on approaching the Mom her kissed the little boy on the head, put him down gently and reached up slapped the mom on the face and walked back out of the bathroom without saying a word.
Everyone cleared out of the bathroom a little while later and we were left to finally have our chance to take care of business.
Then as we left the bathroom, we realized that there was not one around in this deserted hallway. We could not read the signs in Mandarin but there was only one way away from the door we had entered after getting off the buses.
After a while there was a fork in the path. We saw one person and said Delta, which was the airline we were getting on next. The lady sent us to the left. There were arrows on the floor that took us to the Transfer area. This we assumed meant that you would stay in the airport rather than entering China. We did not have Visas for China, and we did not know that you did not need them for the first 72 hours of your visit.
We followed the arrows until we came to a large room that was empty except for lots of stanchions. At the end of the room was a desk with 6 employees and every station had a sign that said closed. We approached the desk, handed them our passports and said, Delta. They gave us a puzzled look and all six went to work at computers. We stood there for a while, maybe 10 minutes. Finally one of them handed us our papers and said. "The computers are down, we can not issue boarding passes at this time." Yes excellent English. We asked where to go and 3 of them pointed back the way we came. Now we followed the other arrows and this time we came to a huge room with lines and lines of empty stanchions. It was about 50 feet to the customs stations at the front of the room. There were 25 desks and all of them were empty except one in the far corner. We ducked under the lines and headed to the desk. The lady was very kind and spoke English. She was confused as to why we were there. She understood computers down and told us that we had to fill our the exit form since we did not have boarding passes. We said ok and traipsed back across the huge room to a desk which had 3 x 4 inch yellow slips of paper. The form asked for our Name, passport number, date of birth and nationality. Oddly all information that was in on our passports. We went back to the lady and she stamped the yellow slips and our passports and sent us down the hall and up the stairs to get our boarding passes.
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